Dover Castle: A Travel Feature

It was strengthened over the years by a succession of English kings, and with good reason, as one of the castle attractions demonstrates. The 1216 Siege Experience takes you back in time to the days when the castle was one of the few remaining places holding out for King John against rebellious citizens, who had allied themselves with Prince Louis of France. Using light, film and sound, the show really brings to life what people would have gone through during that siege, and is well worth seeing.

Beautiful though the castle is, towering on a hill above Dover, England's busiest sea port, the real attraction is buried far beneath the fortifications. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, the situation for the Allied forces was becoming desperate, with the Germans advancing across Europe. Countries were falling rapidly and soldiers from Britain and her allies had retreated to the beaches of Dunkirk in Northern France near the Belgian border. There was nowhere else to fall back to.

Against that background, plans were put together for Operation Dynamo to evacuate the troops back to Britain. The nerve center for this operation was the secret wartime tunnels underneath Dover Castle. These tunnels were first dug during the Napoleonic Wars and were in near constant use from that date onwards, but today they're best known for the work that took place in them in the 1940s.

As you walk through the tunnels, it's impossible to believe that around 700 people were based here during some of the worst days of World War II. That included switchboard staff, after a military telephone exchange was installed to serve the underground headquarters.

It's quite something to see the Command Centre, where Winston Churchill, then the Prime Minister of Great Britain, viewed the Battle of Britain. That's the name given to attempts by the German air force, the Luftwaffe, to try and gain air superiority over the British Royal Air Force. The plan was that once that was achieved, the Germans would then invade Britain. But despite undertaking the most sustained bombing campaign up until that date, the plan failed and is now widely seen as a major turning point in the war.